Throughout its steroids investigation, Major League Baseball has operated with tunnel vision. Players have been the sole target – not the suppliers of performance enhancing drugs, not the coaches who oversee these players, not the owners who profit from their performances. This has proven over the past decade or so to be an ineffective strategy for halting steroid use. So why do the powers that be in baseball insist on punishing the players, and no other party?

Think about this for a second. Let’s say you believe Alex Rodriguez was not being entirely truthful in his WFAN interview — shocking, I know — and you expect the league will find him guilty of performance-enhancing drug use and suspend him.

Who benefits from that outcome? Clean players who were in competition with Rodriguez, certainly, and all fans who want the game free of cheating for good — no matter how much of a pipedream that seems.

But the Yankees benefit, too. If Rodriguez was chemically enhancing his performance while playing for the Yankees, actually, the club benefits twice-over. First, they get a third baseman presumably stronger and healthier than he would have been without juicing. Then, if and when he is caught and suspended, they get out from under his massive salary for part or all of the 2014 season.

From here, it seems there’s little incentive for a club to try to stop aging, expensive players like Rodriguez from cheating. Baseball teams are businesses, understandably motivated by winning and profits more than morality. So what’s to stop a club from looking the other way or even stealthily encouraging an overpaid veteran to juice?

(PHOTO: Rob Carr/Getty Images)

For a concrete example, look at Rodriguez’s teammate CC Sabathia, who struggled with diminished velocity in 2013 and who has never been associated with or suspected of PED use. The Yankees, who have been working to get under the league’s luxury-tax threshold, owe Sabathia at least $76 million through 2016.

Sabathia seems like an upright dude who wants the game clean, but what if he broke bad? What if, under constant pressure to succeed as his body ages and his arm tires — and with free agency looming as soon as the 2017 offseason — he decided to look up and seek out the next Tony Bosch?

Why would the Yankees want to stop that? Again: This is just a hypothetical; no one is suggesting Sabathia would or will go that route. But if he did, and he managed to do so without immediately getting caught, the Yankees would reap the extra wins with no repercussions. Then, if after a couple of seasons, he failed a test and got suspended, the Yanks get millions in payroll that had been allotted to a pitcher in his mid-30s.

If Major League Baseball is serious about ridding the game of PEDs, sanctions should not stop with the players. Punishing teams, too, would help disincentivize juicing from an organizational standpoint and make clubs more vigilant in deterring PED use.

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